Whenever we receive a startup pitch in the mail we have to ask ourselves a very simple question: are they adequately taking size of their competition and dealing with the market fairly? Usually the answer is no. This however is a rare, happy case that is an outlier to that norm.

Most people have heard of VaultPress, the popular WordPress backup system that launched early this year to some fanfare. The company has been plugging away since then, and with good design and a simple implementation have been, so far as we can tell, doing well for themselves.

blogVault, a somewhat lesser known company that is fighting for traction, wants to take on VaultPress by focusing on just a specific few elements of the idea of backing up your blog. To begin, a short point on why backups are important: if you have one copy, you have no copies. That old saying is full of truth, if you only have it saved in one place, you will eventually lose it.

For bloggers who have spent years working on their blogs, such a data failure is too terrible to imagine. That in mind, backing up a blog is just common sense.

Now, saving files to a remote location is not that technically difficult, so if both VaultPress and blogVault are going to earn their keep and find paying customers they are going to have to be quite slick. Starting with VaultPress, the company has made backing up your blog similar to using Mozy, if you are familiar with it. When you go idle, VaultPress backs up every little element of your website. If you need to use the backups, you can quickly ‘restore’ your files from your actual WordPress dashboard.

Simple enough, right? blogVault works in a similar fashion, but is competing on two fronts: price, and migration. While both services seem to have figured out how to backup blogs, blogVault will do it more cheaply (albeit with a far less attractive website), and has a tool to allow you to “migrate [your] sites from one location to another. For example, http://blog.example.com to http://example.com/blog.”

The cost differential is the big deal, with a discrepancy of more than $100 per year between the two. On the face of it, blogVault has differentiated themselves in both a feature and experience (cost) ways, but it still feels a touch lacking. They have to fight against a better known competitor, meaning that they are going to need more special sauce.

Still, if you are looking for a dead cheap way to back up your blog, blogVault might be the company for you. Only on the internet could you have two companies that are both so specialized, both so useful, and so locked in combat for market share.